A Nanny in the Family Read online

  “I didn’t say you had. Surprised me, perhaps. You were the one, after all, who seemed to prefer more...” He cleared his throat again and offered her a glass containing a pale gold liquid. “More sedate swimwear.”

  She gripped Honey-Peaches even tighter. “I’m allowed to change my mind, and so, apparently, are you. That isn’t wine you’re pouring.”

  “It’s ice wine, and very pleasant—a sort of cross between a liqueur and—”

  “I know what it is,” she snapped, resenting his assumption that her palate was as callow as her taste in bathing attire.

  He took a mouthful of the wine. “You’re full of surprises tonight, aren’t you?”

  “No,” she said, tired suddenly, of sparring with him and wishing she could abandon the role she’d elected to play and simply be herself. “I guess, like you, I’ve just had a long day.”

  “All the more reason to relax now, then.” Taking her untouched glass and returning it with his on the table, he pried Honey-Peaches away from her. “Leave the mutt to sleep on the chaise before you strangle it, Nicole, and come for a swim with me.”

  She’d swum with him before. More accurately, she’d been in the pool with him before, often. So why did her heart lurch violently and her pulse suddenly race? What was it that made swimming with him now, with only the moon for company, so much more dangerous and exciting?

  She knew why. Before, Tommy had always been with them, a reminder of why she was involved in this bizarre and tragic charade whose rules only she fully understood. Tonight, there was nothing to come between her and Pierce; no pretense, no predetermined rules, not even the repressive black maillot which made her look more like a college sophomore than a woman in her prime.

  “Come,” he said again, his voice low and hypnotic.

  Metaphorically, those innocent turquoise waters were infested with sharks bent on destroying her. Still, she obeyed him.

  Wordlessly, she placed Honey-Peaches on the chaise and followed, trancelike, as he led her down the steps at the shallow end of the pool. When their feet touched bottom, he backed into deeper water and drew her after him.

  Too soon she was out of her depth but still he didn’t release her. Instead, he pulled her toward him so that her legs tangled with his. The sharks circled closer. “See?” he murmured huskily. “This isn’t so bad, is it?”

  Not bad, perhaps, but foolish.

  And dangerous. Definitely dangerous!

  And heaven.

  He tugged her into the middle of the pool. Slid his arms around her waist and closed the last tiny gap between them. There was little doubt in her mind that he was going to kiss her, and none at all that she was going to let him.

  And that was the most dangerous, foolish, heavenly thing of all.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EVER since that other, too-brief exchange in the upstairs hall, she’d dreamed about his kissing her again. But nothing could have prepared her for the reality of it. Reality? Magic was a more apt description, a slowspreading enchantment that began with the first soft brush of his mouth against hers and intensified until her entire being was dissolving in rivers of sensation. Was flowing toward him and around him, binding her to him with invisible, inextricable strands.

  He tightened his hold, sliding one hand down to cradle her bottom and anchoring the back of her head with the other. The pressure of his lips increased, testing, tasting. Her last hazy impression before her eyes fell shut was of stars spinning in the sky and the moon brazenly watching the slow-moving water ballet being enacted below. And then there was nothing but the scent of night-cooled flowers, the sweet heavy flavor of ice wine on her tongue, and a raging in her blood that defied description.

  She should have put a stop to things right then. The woman she’d been up until that moment would have acknowledged there was Tommy to think of, there was the lie, the deceit. And most of all, there was Pierce and the moonlight, and she was too sophisticated not to know the consequences of allowing passion to blind her to all these other complications.

  But she’d become another creature, one bewitched by kisses she had no business accepting, and consumed by a hunger that acknowledged no other protocol but its own greedy satisfaction.

  When she felt his fingers skim over her shoulder, taking the strap of her swimsuit with them as they slid down her arm, she did worse than try to stop him. She helped him, angling herself in such a way that in no time at all her naked breasts sprang pale and buoyant against the muscle-sheathed planes of his chest.

  She felt his gaze on her, burning a path over her flesh, and then his mouth. His tongue traced the curve of her breast and thunderheads gathered somewhere very deep within her. He found her nipple, teased it beyond endurance, and lightning arced the length of her, searing everything it touched: her heart, her soul.

  She fought to contain the blood racing through her veins like fire. Opened her mouth to draw air into her beleaguered lungs, and uttered a strangled moan instead.

  “Nicole,” he whispered, beseeching her, and then again, more raggedly, “Nicole...?”

  She knew what he was asking. Knew, too, that in allowing her head to drop back and expose the vulnerable length of her throat, she was offering herself without reservation. Without any sense of self-preservation.

  The water swirled around them, warm, conspiratorial, its gentle current a seduction in itself that swept them even farther past the point of caring that what they were doing would, in time, exact a terrible price. Her legs floated up to secure themselves around his waist. She heard the low rumble in his throat, felt through the thin layers of fabric still separating them the strong, hard surge of his flesh against hers.

  She was not aware that they had drifted the length of the pool until he released her long enough to hook one arm around the diving ladder suspended beside them. At that she cried out, desolated by the distance widening between them.

  “I’m here,” he murmured against her mouth, pulling him to her again, his legs tangling with hers.

  And he was. Her swimsuit slipped to her waist, to her ankles, and with a quick flick of her feet, joined his trunks somewhere in the glimmering depths below. He was beside her, around her, and then, swiftly, smoothly, he was within her.

  The lightning arced again, torching them both. Flickered and leapt in pulsing rhythm, a torment too acute to withstand. She opened her eyes, silently begging him for the release he would not grant. Black and gleaming, his hair lay flat against his skull. Water trickled down his face, spiked his eyelashes.

  “Pierce,” she pleaded.

  He shook his head; dipped his mouth to hers, silencing her. She felt the vigor of him, the passion, the raw masculine strength. In what was surely a moment of pure madness, she wanted to whisper “I love you” and bind herself to him through eternity.

  Instead, she buried her face against him. Sank her teeth softly into the sinew of his shoulder. Swallowed the small scream of delirium that filled her throat as the storm swept closer and hung poised, choosing its own time to destroy them.

  There was no deflecting it. He knew that, too, although he tried to halt its progress, bracing himself against the ladder and welding her hips to his with an iron grip as if, by the sheer force of his will, he could turn aside destiny.

  It was no use. She disintegrated around him, a tiny pebble lost in a flood of heat so intense that nothing of her was left except the ever-widening circles that marked her passing.

  Her body still sweetly linked with his, she sagged against him, the tremors of fulfillment to which he’d brought her still echoing within. At length the din subsided and she became aware again of the soft sounds of the external world around her. The lapping of the water against the tiled wall of the pool, the sleepy chirp of a bird, the faint rustle of the breeze in the leaves of the dogwood tree.

  She ventured a glance at Pierce. His head lay flung back against the top rung of the ladder. His eyes were closed. Had it not been for the vein throbbing viciously in his neck, he could ha
ve been sleeping. Yet what sort of dream carved his mouth so severely and drew his brows together in such uncompromising censure?

  Despite the warmth of the night Nicole shivered, the pleasure he had brought to her swamped by the ever-present guilt lurking in the shadows. From the moment she’d met him, she’d been deceiving this man. No use now trying to mitigate her latest transgression by painting it as anything other than what it was: the greatest lie of all.

  She had not made love with Pierce. Making love implied a mutual affection and trust between two people. It demanded honesty and respect. She could not offer the first, and did not deserve the second. But because she was hungry for him, she’d settled for unprotected sex and no matter how she wished she could define it otherwise, it refused to present itself in a more forgiving light.

  Pierce appeared to agree with her. Even as she prepared to slip free of him, he opened his eyes and looked not at her but through her. In all her years of nursing she had never met a more empty, hopeless gaze.

  And then he drew his hand down his face, as if in doing so he could wipe away everything that had transpired between the pair of them in the last half hour, and said very quietly, “Oh, damn!”

  A fist seemed to close around her heart. Blindly, before the sob rising in her throat could betray her, she pushed away from him and swam underwater to the shallow end of the pool. Reaching up, she grabbed the nearest towel and shielded herself with it as she climbed the steps.

  She did not know he’d followed her until her swimsuit landed with a plop at her feet. She ignored it and, tying the towel around herself sarong style, fled up the garden to the house. She could not face him again that night. She was too afraid of what she might read in his expression.

  Whatever her doubts about Pierce’s feelings, however, she entertained none about Tommy’s when he met the puppy. The moment he set eyes on her, his face lit up with a glow that went a long way toward easing Nicole’s heartache. Dropping to his knees, he let out a squeal of undiluted joy.

  For her part, Honey-Peaches raced out from under the table where she’d been busily chewing on an old tea towel knotted in the middle, and flung herself at Tommy in unabandoned ecstasy.

  “I swear a body would think they were litter mates,” Janet said, watching the mutual exchange with a smile. “I haven’t seen that child look so happy since dear knows when. Even that benighted dog is smiling and as for her tail—it’ll wag right off at the rate it’s going!”

  She was right. In the blur of movement of boy and dog rolling around on the floor together, Honey-Peaches wore a grin that stretched from one floppy ear to the other and quite how she remained earthbound was a mystery.

  “Whether Pierce approves or not, bringing her home was the best thing I could have done,” Nicole said.

  “Nicole,” Janet began, her voice sounding a note of caution.

  “I mean it, Janet. I really don’t care what our high and mighty Commander thinks and I’m quite prepared to tell him so to his face. In fact, I’ve had quite enough of him being the one to call all the shots around here.”

  “Is that so?” Pierce said from the doorway, and Nicole felt the bottom fall out of her stomach. “Then perhaps we’d better adjourn to the library where you can give free rein to your dissatisfactions without fear of corrupting innocent ears.”

  “We haven’t had breakfast yet.” she said, ticked off beyond measure at the quaver in her voice that she couldn’t quite repress. He stood very tall and erect, every inch the officer not about to countenance mutiny from the ranks. A daunting figure, indeed, and about as far removed from last night’s lover as was an attack-trained Doberman pinscher from a spaniel.

  “Nor ever likely to at this rate,” he replied, reaching down to separate squirming pup from wriggling child. “Allow me to expedite matters by keeping an eye on the mutt while you attend to your duties.”

  As if she knew her fate hung in the balance, Honey-Peaches switched her attentions to Pierce and proceeded to bestow affection on him with almost as much enthusiasm as she’d lavished it on Tommy. Dignity remaining intact regardless, Pierce pinned Nicole in an enigmatic stare. “I’ll be in the library, Nicole. Don’t keep me waiting too long.”

  “Well.” Janet breathed, as the door swung shut behind him, “if that isn’t enough to put a person off her feed! But I did try to warn you, Nicole.”

  “I know.” Nicole blew out a sigh. “I just hope he doesn’t take his annoyance out on...” She rolled her eyes to where Tommy had settled down with his bowl of cereal. “I hate to think how disappointed he’ll be if the dog has to go.”

  “Pierce isn’t that kind of man,” Janet said. “Whatever his failings, he’s not the kind to be unfair.”

  In her heart, Nicole agreed, but her belief was put to the test when she approached the library. The French doors were open and Pierce stood on the patio, brows drawn together in a frown, watching Honey-Peaches who had both paws as well as her nose planted in a bowl of milk.

  Running the tip of her tongue over lips as dry as sand, Nicole murmured a faint “Ahem!” to alert him to her presence.

  He looked a little startled. “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said, affording her the briefest glance of acknowledgment before fixing his attention on the puppy again. “I was miles away.”

  Considering how best to dispose of a nanny who had overstepped her place in one way too many, perhaps? Prepared for the worst, Nicole compressed her lips.

  He noticed. “I’ve been thinking about the dog,” he said, after a pause.

  “You mean Honey-Peaches?” Oh, for pity’s sake, Nicole, do you see any other dog in the vicinity?

  “Exactly. Honey-Peaches will have to go. There are some things I refuse to live with.”

  “How can you be so callous?” Disappointment, so bitter on her tongue she could almost taste it, had her spitting the question at him.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  His tone and her own common sense told her to stop then, before she made a bad situation even worse, but what the heck! She’d threatened to speak her mind and she’d gone too far to back down now. “You saw Tommy’s face when he was playing with the dog, the light in his eyes. How can you crush a child’s happiness so unfeelingly? Or is this just your way of letting me know that, your momentary lapse of judgment last night notwithstanding, you’re still the Commander, in charge of all decision making? Would you really sacrifice a helpless puppy, not to mention Tommy’s well-being, just to reestablish your position of authority in this household?”

  He regarded her in silence for a moment which threatened to tick into eternity. Finally, he said mildly, “I’m afraid your anxiety to paint me as the villain of the piece has led you to the wrong conclusion, Nicole. I’m not proposing to get rid of the dog, I merely object to her name. I feel like a bloody fool calling her Honey-Peaches, so you’re going to have to choose between one and the other. If it matters at all, I’d prefer Peaches.”

  Humiliation washed over her then, wave after devastating wave. “Oh,” she croaked. “I see. I...um apologize.”

  “There’s no reason at all,” he went on, appearing to be fascinated by a tub of Martha Washington pelargoniums at the edge of the patio, “why we shouldn’t keep her. She seems to have a good temperament.”

  That he should choose now to be the soul of reason! “Thank you. I can’t tell you what this will mean to Tommy. He’ll be thrilled.”

  “Yes.” Pierce switched his attention to her for a moment then swung back to the pelargoniums. “It’s another very fine day,” he said woodenly.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you and Tom have any special plans?”

  “No,” she said, grateful that he couldn’t see how her gaze roamed over him, stripping away the gray and white striped shirt and tailored charcoal slacks and recalling the body underneath. Remembering the powerful shoulders, the long, strong legs and how her hips had nested so perfectly against his. How he had held her close to him as if she were, for a brief d
azzling time, the most precious thing in the world to him.

  “It might be a good idea to keep him fairly quiet. He threw up on the way home last night.”

  Last night. Strung with tension, the words hovered reproachfully in the air. He felt it, too. “Speaking of last night,” he began.

  “Probably too much excitement,” she said at the same time, and could have died on the spot.

  To her surprise he laughed, a harshly grating sound that contained not a shred of amusement, and swung ’round to face her. “I didn’t ask you in here to talk about the weather, Nicole, and I frankly don’t give a damn what you call the dog. I think we both know that.”

  Determined to keep her mouth shut until she could be sure that what came out was something she could live with, Nicole pressed her lips together and stared at a spot next to the peony blossoms in the hearth.

  “We need to talk about last night,” he said, and when she gave a little moan of distress and averted her eyes, went on, “No, don’t turn away from me. I feel enough of a heel as it is. Of all the mistakes I’ve made in my life, what I instigated last night ranks as the most unforgivable.”

  Stretching out one hand, he cupped her jaw and tilted it so that short of closing her eyes, she had no choice but to meet his gaze. He was such a decent man, so utterly beautiful and honorable, that it broke her heart to look at him and know how deeply he regretted what had been, for her, an unforgettable experience.

  “It will not happen again,” he said.

  They were the same words he’d used the first time he’d kissed her but this time she couldn’t drum up the fiery hauteur with which she’d repelled him then. This time she wanted to weep because much though she wished it otherwise, the simple truth was that she could not bring herself to regret what they’d shared last night. Right or wrong, it blazed in her memory, something to be hoarded and treasured against the time when he would look at her with disgust for the deception she had practiced on him.

  “I hope,” he said, “that you won’t let...it...induce you to resign.”